


a seventh seal on the 99th floor

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Demon Summoning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 20:38:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16730223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “…Okay?” Karkat raises his head from rifling through editorial shoot proofs your agent sent you. “I tell you I’m only successfully summoned by the presence of a reader’s innate desire and the price is your immortal spirit being dragged back to the fifth circle of some Renaissance asshole’s wet dream and all you can say is ‘okay?’”“You know, Karkat, I’m starting to think you’re a really hard guy to please.”





	a seventh seal on the 99th floor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vel16](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vel16/gifts).



> for vel, who wanted some demonstuck with alpha dave and karkat! alpha dave is criminally underrated and i hope i did him some justice. enjoy!

The little light on the top of your camera is still blinking a colour known by all in this universe with semi-reliable Wifi and superior taste in post-post-post-modernist culture as your favourite. It’s not that red is underrated, it’s just, and this is true, _that good_ —barring your unfortunate visual organs, lots of cool shit is red. The “record” indicator on a project? Check. MacIntosh apples in all their pre-peeled glory? Bingo. 

The irises of the para-dimensional entity on your bedroom floor? Unexpected, but you might as well roll with it. 

He’s a little weird-looking, the demon. It could be the ash-grey of his skin, like he takes charcoal baths, or the bright little horns poking out from his curls. (It’s definitely not how thick and full of tousle potential it looks, but you still feel it’s worth noting.) It could also be the fact that he doesn’t look at you like you’re an untouchable god. 

After another minute of silence you pretend is voluntary, you crack. “You drink coffee?”

The demon looks up sharply. 

“Coffee. Y’know. Stimulant, the best part of waking up, not including government overthrow and Oscar pre-parties?” You lean forward in your chair, elbows on your knees. “Sprechen Sie English, dude?” 

“Fuck my entire existence,” says the demon. 

You blink behind your shades—you didn’t actually expect him to sound…you don’t know, nice. It’s got that butterscotch kinda voice, a little rough around the edges, like what you wish you sounded like back when you chain-smoked. “So is that a no on the beverage? Cause I’m not gonna lie to you, the closest thing I have to anything drinkable is a shitty Keurig sample from Costco I got when I bought thirty pounds of rubber bands for a personal project—”

“Are you gonna name it or not?” he interrupts. 

“…name what? You?” You reach back to your desk, clicking around the summons page. Two or three HOT ELDRTICH SINGLES IN YOUR AREA ads pop up and you swipe them away with a snort. Know thy audience, interwebs. “I always figured y’all came with names like satanic Cabbage Patch Kids.”

He stands, brushing himself off: even with you still in your chair you’re still almost eye-to-eye. Somehow, you feel smaller. “Not me, toolbelt. Your deal.” 

Deal? Shit, maybe your shades need a prescription. “I didn’t, uh. I don’t. Need one?”

“Let me ask you, Dave. Do you usually shit out your mouth, or is this a special occasion and the trapdoor releasing balloons from the ceiling just got stuck?” 

“Are you speaking to me now, or is your name also Dave?” 

“It’s Karkat. Okay? Will you stop asking now?” He kind of…mists around the edges, his eyes like lit coals. 

You flash him a grin. “That your real name, Karkat?” Shit, that sounds pretty nice on your tongue. You tuck the thought away to edit in post. 

“I’m not under obligation to tell you.” 

“Seems like a pretty demonic thing to do, give a fake name to shut me up.”

He—Karkat—rubs his temples: his fingertips are pointed and dark, like they’ve been dipped in ink. You kinda hope your camera can pick that up. “It’s clearly a dud strategy. So come on, buddy, I don’t have all night. What do you need?” 

Now you frown. “I told you, I don’t wanna make a deal.”

“If you’re fucking with me, I like being bought dinner first, as is your human custom.” This guy’s teeth are wicked sharp. All your resulting tangents are dumber than the last. “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want a deal. Did you read any of the summons whatsoever?”

Well, no. “Well, no.”

“Oh, my god.” Karkat looks more agonized than suburban moms trying to find morals in your movies. (They’ll never find any, but it’s funnier not to tell them.)

“Honestly, man, if this is a recurring problem you should probably change the typeface. A lot of those s’ look like f’s, you know what I mean?”

“Dave,” he repeats, and it suddenly dawns on you that, yes, he’s been calling you by your unmentioned name this whole time. Fuck, you’ve almost forgotten what it’s like—the novelty of “Mister Strider” hadn’t taken long to wear off, and even keeping earbuds in during conversations and in the confines of your dressing room didn’t retain any element of surprise.

You’re leaning in again. “Karkat.”

“I know I don’t look it, but I’m on a fucking schedule. Okay?” He really does like he could use a coffee. Or a Xanax, maybe. “Come up with something, I don’t care what, then I’ll take my payment and fuck off on my merry way.”

“Payment.” You glance back at your camera in a _y’all seeing this?_ motion. “As in like—like a soul?” 

“No, like a gumball machine from the third prize shelf at Chuck E. Cheese. Yes, your soul, shit-dip.”

Huh. You should’ve seen that one coming.

You look again, reflexively, at the on-off dance of your camera light. It is a remotely activated security blanket, because real security blankets are so three movies ago. “Okay,” you say.

“…Okay?” Karkat raises his head from rifling through editorial shoot proofs your agent sent you. “I tell you I’m only successfully summoned by the presence of a reader’s innate desire and the price is your immortal spirit being dragged back to the fifth circle of some Renaissance asshole’s wet dream and all you can say is ‘okay?’”

“You know, Karkat, I’m starting to think you’re a really hard guy to please.”

And then he’s got this—this knife on you, dark and curved into a crescent moon and sharp as death against your throat. Your pulse jumpstarts like a Harley-Davidson; Karkat’s pupils blow as if they can smell your adrenaline, and maybe he can. You are suddenly struck with how little you really know. 

“I,” he says, through a mouthful of broken-glass fangs, “am not leaving this abysmal collection of furniture and paint vomit you call home until the deal’s struck. I’d love to! I’m unspeakably aroused just thinking about it! But I can’t.”

You feel like a kid again, playing dress-up in your bedroom. Top half of a three-piece suit, custom printed pyjama pants on the bottom half. (You only ever record from the waist up anyway, and you’re planning on wearing this look to the next red carpet because, let’s face it, it fucking rules.) You wet your lips with your tongue. “I keep telling you, man, you’re S.O.L. I don’t have some deep dark desire to trade my soul for. You may as well take it, I don’t need it. That’s showbiz, baby.”

Karkat’s blade does not waver. His eyes brighten again, feverish, like he could tear you apart to get at whatever lie chilling in your thoracic cage he can smell. “I need a fucking transfer,” he grumbles. “Your kind used to be a lot more attentive to the terms and conditions.”

“I’m serious. I don’t need, like, a hit taken out on anyone. I have money. Too much of it, probably, but my collection of early Mesozoic fossils might say otherwise to some people.”

“What the fuck are—no, okay, no. I can’t just— _take_ your soul.”

He...looks like he wants to, though. Yep. Karkat kind of looks like he’s talking out his ass to stop from yoinking out your spirit _Indiana Jones_ style. It’s cliché, in your book, for someone to appear old and young all at once – even you, walking the baby-face tightrope when you’re freshly shaved – but you guess demons never got that memo. 

You can still hear your pulse in your ears. Karkat finally lowers his weapon, sighing. “I think I’ll take you up on that drink now.”

* * *

“So what’s that do?”

Karkat is sitting on your hilariously large mattress, legs tucked under him and a WORLD’S OKAYEST FISH HATER mug full of shitty coffee in his hands. The ceramic around his fingertips changes colour, a little. He gestures with the mug at your camera. 

“Oh.” Belatedly, you’re almost embarrassed, which is an emotion that Striders don’t feel. You’re the only Strider you know, but that is, frankly, irrelevant. “I figured it’d make a good show. If, you know, anything actually showed up.”

The liquid barely passing itself off as coffee bubbles in the mug; Karkat ignores it, instead dumping another of the little sugar packets you provided him with into the boiling drink and stirring it with his pinky. “People seriously have nothing better to do than to watch something _maybe_ materialize on your floor?”

“People will watch anything I make.”

Ugh, it sounds like a flex. But it’s true—one time you accidentally livestreamed yourself eating cereal for an hour and a half, and three tabloids plus the goddamn _Post_ had praised your avant-garde critique of the over-usage of long takes. 

Karkat takes a swig of coffee. “This tastes like pencil shavings from the Great Depression,” he decides. Then, “Are you lonely, Dave Strider?”

Something roars like a wind tunnel. It might be your own self-deprecation, back like a husband from the war. “Why would I be?”

“Fuck me, you’re dumb as a post _and_ a terrible liar.” He sticks his pinky in his mouth, then tosses his hair from his eyes; the vivid orange-yellow of his horns are almost as bright as the rest of your bedroom lighting. 

“I didn’t summon a psychoanalyst,” you say, crossing one leg over the other. You crave a smoke. “If I did, you’d be a hell of a lot more blonde.”

“I bet I can taste it,” Karkat muses, “if this nether-piss hasn’t obliterated my olfactory senses completely. Seriously, you said Costco?” 

“Okay, can we hold the phone here? You can fucking _what_ my _what_?”

He rolls his eyes. He does it quite often, in your short time together, but every impressive lap of his eyeballs around your little perimeter of poor decisions gives you another chance to get a good look at the colour. It keeps changing on you, like a gem held up to the light. “In your blood. God, people are obtuse, it’s a miracle you even managed to figure out how to strike a deal for fire.”

You tap your index to your foot. There are little crocodiles in sunglasses on your socks. “Keep your story straight, Karkat, are you a vampire or a demon?”

“That’s a shitty little generalization,” he says, “and Costco’s Medium Roast Original Sin here tastes better than human blood. Don’t flatter yourself.”

Goddamn, but you can practically hear the fake comments being typed out with vigour as you sit there. “So what do you do with it? My blood, I mean.”

“Currency, Dave. Old as tits, no inflation.”

“Haha, gross.”

Karkat raises his mug in a slightly more menacing gesture. You are a little turned on. You need a cigarette like you haven’t in six years. “The shit-I-give bank tragically closed down a few decades ago, so that’s how we’re dealing. And before you keep making goldfish brains look like Fort Knox again, I don’t deal unless you want to.” He points to himself, now: you don’t need his hands to guide your eyes, if you’re being honest, but you appreciate that he’s such a team player. “I’m breathing your stale penthouse air, which means—”

“Yeah, okay?” you interrupt, sharper than you like to think you can be. “Yes, I’m lonely. My empire is built on JPEG artifacts and projection too big for any screen they’ll invent within the next four hundred years. Every gal and guy with Internet access has gotten to second base with all four letters of my name and frankly, dude, I’m surprised I even _have_ anything close to a soul left over from all that rose-coloured glasses bullshit. So I’m sorry to waste your time, little horny man—”

“Hey.”

“—but I seriously doubt you can do anything for me.” 

Karkat puts down the mug and stands. Okay, no, he doesn’t just stand, he gets up in your business, until you feel like you’re lying on hot nails. Like they’re stuffed down your throat and burning the honesty right out of you. He offers you a front-row seat to his chompers. “Try me.” 

Is he deaf? “Are you deaf? Here, lift your curls so I can see if you have earholes.”

“With that attitude it’s a goddamn miracle you’re friendless.” 

“Hey, fuck you.”

He kisses you instead.

You’ve kissed before, sure, but not like this. Karkat is just as warm against you, and any misty quality to him has hardened to hot iron. You don’t know what’s holding you up, but you’re not totally sure it’s your legs. 

And then he sinks his teeth into your bottom lip, quick as a snake (or whatever he wouldn’t get mad at you for comparing him to). You taste copper; you taste Karkat’s tongue. Far away, you think maybe something is burning. 

You aren’t sure how long it lasts, this kiss, but it’s not long enough—but just like that, Karkat sits back on the bed, ember eyes boring new holes into your person. “Right, then. I’d say it was a pleasure, but I’m still a little on the fence about that.”

“What, it’s over?” You are, frankly, impressed with your ability to form a sentence, even if it only takes one hand to count its syllables. 

Karkat laughs. It’s a funny noise, like it doesn’t come natural to demons and he’s trying something a little out of the box. You don’t hate it. “The deal, yeah. Congratulations, your giant novelty cheque will come through the mail in three business days, blah blah shipping and handling blah.”

You blink at him, then look pointedly around your room. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Incorrect, Strider. As of” — he checks a watch he isn’t wearing — “forty seconds ago, I am on indeterminate leave from crossroads duty. I will sleep anywhere from futons to closets to cat boxes, pending cleanliness.” 

Oh. “Oh.” 

Horribly, you feel your face try to imitate his sad attempt at a smile. “I guess I have some space I can clear.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get too cheesy, there, buddy, demons have this whole lactose thing.”

“Hey, Karkat?”

He looks at you, spinning his knife between his hands. “Yeah?”

“Do you ever kiss, like, recreationally? Like not to seal loophole friendship deals?”

The light in the corner of your room is still ticking bravely on, but you decide that your audience for tonight can be just one grey-skinned weirdo, and you lean over to switch it off. 


End file.
